With two games now held at the on-campus stadium, the Board of Governors heard some gameday feedback during their Thursday meeting. 

Associated Students of Colorado State University President Josh Silva outlined the student government’s goals for improving tailgating.

“Some challenges we noticed were there wasn’t a lot of general awareness of the lot by students — especially being such a seismic shift in how the lot operated at Hughes Stadium — and understanding that the lot exists for tailgating,” Silva said.

Overall, they have had trouble filling the space. Many students at the last two games used the lot only for parking. 

To address this, ASCSU has done some rebranding to increase awareness of the lot and plans to introduce pre-game programming to encourage students to stay longer and bolster their presence in the lot. 

Joe Parker, director of athletics, gave a report on the logistic results of the first two on-campus gamedays.

Over 37,000 people attended the opening game and 27,000 attended the second stadium game. While the first game had queuing issues getting people into the stadium and congestion problems with concession lines blocking concourses, the issues improved by the second game, according to Parker.

According to Mike Hooker, CSU’s director of public affairs and communication, exactly 37,583 people attended the first gameday and 27,038 attended the second gameday.

Parker said two-and-half years of planning contributed to good gameday transportation.

“We planned pretty intensively on what we wanted the gameday experience to look like, we contemplated most every scenario that could come up relative to hosting game on campus, and I think we hit the mark pretty well,” Parker said. “We identified all the parking on campus for gameday patrons.”

Many people who used the parking spaces were season ticket holders.

According to Parker, student re-park has gone very well so far with only 50 vehicles towed for parking in the gameday lots. 

Hooker wrote in an email to the Collegian that 50 cars were towed from campus gameday lots each game weekend and about half of the cars towed were not registered with CSU Parking and Transportation Services, but there was no way of knowing if the owners of the towed cars had any affiliation with CSU.

A similar number of vehicles were towed by the City of Fort Collins from streets in surrounding neighborhoods that are part of the stadium event parking permit neighborhood zones, according to Hooker.

Bicycle utilization and alternative transportation were popular options for the first game. 

They had predicted 5,000 gameday patrons would utilize the gameday transit efforts but recorded 7,000 on the first game. According to Hooker,  these numbers reflect the number of game attendees who rode transit, not trips provided.

According to Parker, post-game traffic patterns were not overwhelmed by people exiting campus.

“We’re fortunate to have the MAX system because that was an opportunity … to open up, really, the entire community and more Park-and-Ride options,” Parker said. “That was a highly utilized option for most people.”

Collegian news reporter Samantha Ye can be reached at news@collegian.com or on Twitter @samxye4.